Unequal Shares: The Surprising Facts about Charter Schools and Overcrowding

As many NYC public schools adapt to life in full or overcrowded school buildings, charter school co-locations have been targeted for blame. To get beyond warring anecdotes, we took a look at the DOE's latest "Blue Book" data on building utilization across the city.

We found some surprising facts:

Judging by utilization rates, co-located school buildings tend to be much less crowded than single-school builings--and by a wide margin.

Among buildings with co-located schools, those with charters are on average less crowded than those without.

Where charter schools are co-located, the more crowded side usually belongs to the charter school.

These differences hold up even if you accept Comptroller John Liu's report about the Blue Book's error rate.

Charter school co-location and school crowding are both important issues. They're also separate issues, as any fair-minded debate should acknowledge.